Labour in Irish History

by James Connolly

Remember still, through good and ill,
How vain were prayers and tears.
How vain were words till flashed the swords
Of the Irish Volunteers.
-- Thomas Davis.

The theory that the fleeting `prosperity'
of Ireland in the time we refer to was caused by the Parliament of
Grattan is only useful to its propagators as a prop to their
argument that the Legislative Union between Great Britain and
Ireland destroyed the trade of the latter country, and that,
therefore, the repeal of that Union placed all manufactures on a
paying basis. The fact that the Union placed all Irish manufactures
upon an absolutely equal basis legally with the manufactures of
England is usually ignored, or, worse, still, is so perverted in its
statement as to leave the impression that the reverse is the case.
In fact many thousands of our countrymen still believe that English
laws prohibit mining in Ireland after certain minerals, and the
manufacture of certain articles.

A moment's reflection should remove such an
idea. An English capitalist will cheerfully invest his money in
Timbuctoo or China, or Russia, or anywhere that he thinks he can
secure a profit, even though it may be in the territory of his
mortal enemy. He does not invest his money in order to give
employment to his workers, but to make a profit, and hence it would
be foolish to expect that he would allow his Parliament to make laws
prohibiting him from opening mines or factories in Ireland to make a
profit out of the Irish workers. And there are not, and have not
been since the Union, any such laws.

If a student desires to continue the study
of this remarkable controversy in Irish history, and to compare this
Parliamentarian theory of Irish industrial decline with that we have
just advanced -- the Socialist theory outlined in our previous
chapter -- he has an easy and effective course to pursue in order to
bring this matter to the test. Let him single out the most prominent
exponents of Parliamentarianism and propound the following question:

Please explain the process by which the
removal of Parliament from Dublin to London -- a removal absolutely
unaccompanied by any legislative interference with Irish industry --
prevented the Irish capitalistic class from continuing to produce
goods for the Irish market?

He will get no logical answer to his
question -- no answer that any reputable thinker on economic
questions would accept for one moment. He will instead undoubtedly
be treated to a long enumeration of the number of tradesmen and
labourers employed at manufacturers in Ireland before the Union, and
the number employed at some specific period, 20 or 30 years
afterwards. This was the method adopted by Daniel O'Connell, the
Liberator, in his first great speech in which he began his Repeal
agitation, and has been slavishly copied and popularised by all his
imitators since. But neither O'Connell nor any of his imitators
have ever yet attempted to analyse and explain the process by which
those industries were destroyed. The nearest approach to such
an explanation ever essayed is the statement that the Union led to
absentee landlordism and the withdrawal of the custom of these
absentees from Irish manufacturers. Such an explanation is simply no
explanation at all. It is worse than childish. Who would seriously
contend that the loss of a few thousand aristocratic clients killed,
for instance, the leather industry, once so flourishing in Ireland
and now scarcely existent. The district in the city of Dublin which
lies between Thomas Street and the South Circular Road was once a
busy hive of men engaging in the tanning of leather and all its
allied trades. Now that trade has almost entirely disappeared from
this district. Were the members of Irish Parliament and the Irish
landlords the only wearers of shoes in Ireland? -- the only persons
for whose use leather was tanned and manufactured? If not, how did
their emigration to England make it impossible for the Irish
manufacturer to produce shoes or harness for the millions of people
still left in the country after the Union? The same remark applies
to the weavers, once so flourishing a body in the same district, to
the woollen trade, to the fishing trade, and so down along the line.
The people of Ireland still wanted all these necessaries of life
after the Union just as much as before, yet the superficial
historian tells us that the Irish manufacturer was unable to cater
to their demand, and went out of business accordingly. Well, we
Irish are credited with being gifted with a strong sense of humour,
but one is almost inclined to doubt it in the face of gravity with
which the Parliamentary theory has been accepted by the masses of
the Irish people.

It surely is an amusing theory when we
consider that it implies that the Irish manufacturers were so
heartbroken, grieving over losing the trade of a few thousand
rack-renting landlords, that they could not continue to make a
profit by supplying the wants of the millions of Irish people at
their doors. The English and the Scotch, the French and the Belgian
manufacturers, miners, merchants, and fishermen could and did wax
fat prosperous by supplying the wants of the Irish commonalty, but
the Irish manufacturer could not. He had to shut up shop and go to
the poorhouse because my Lord Rackrent of Castle Rackrent, and his
immediate personal following, had moved to London.

If our Parliamentarian historians had not
been the most superficial of all recorders of history; if their
shallowness had not been so phenomenal that there is no equal to it
to be found except in the bigotry and stupidity of their loyalist
rivals, they might easily have formulated from the same set of facts
another theory equally useful to their cause, and more in consonance
with the truth. That other theory may be stated thus: --

That the Act of Union was made possible
because Irish manufacture was weak, and, consequently, Ireland had
not an energetic capitalist class with sufficient public spirit and
influence to prevent the Union.

Industrial decline having set in, the Irish
capitalist class was not able to combat the influence of the
corruption fund of the English Government, or to create and lead a
party strong enough to arrest the demoralisation of Irish public
life. This we are certain is the proper statement of the case. Not
that the loss of the Parliament destroyed Irish manufacture, but
that the decline of Irish manufacture, due to causes already
outlined, made possible the destruction of the Irish Parliament. Had
a strong enterprising and successful Irish capitalist class been in
existence in Ireland, a Parliamentary reform investing the Irish
masses with the suffrage would have been won under the guns of the
Volunteers without a drop of blood being shed; and with a Parliament
elected under such conditions the Act of Union would have been
impossible. But the Irish capitalist class used the Volunteers to
force commercial reforms from the English Government and then,
headed by Henry Grattan, forsook and denounced the Volunteers when
that body sought, by reforming the representative system, to make it
more responsive to the will of the people, and thus to secure in
peace what they had won by the threat of violence. An Ireland
controlled by popular suffrage would undoubtedly have sought to save
Irish industry, while it was yet time, by a stringent system of
protection which would have imposed upon imported goods a tax heavy
enough to neutralise the advantages accruing to the foreigner from
his coal supply, and such a system might have averted that decline
of Irish industry which, as we have already stated, was otherwise
inevitable. But the only hope of realising that Ireland lay then in
the armed force of the Volunteers; and as the capitalist class did
not feel themselves strong enough as a class to hold the ship of
state against the aristocracy on the one hand and the people on the
other, they felt impelled to choose the only alternative -- viz., to
elect to throw in their lot with one or other of the contending
parties. They chose to put their trust in the aristocracy, abandoned
the populace, and as a result were deserted by the class whom they
had trusted, and went down into bankruptcy and slavery with the
class they had betrayed.

A brief glance at the record of the
Volunteer movement will illustrate the far-reaching treachery with
which the capitalist class of Ireland emulated their aristocratic
compatriots who

...sold for place or gold,
Their country and their God.

but, unlike them, contrived to avoid the
odium their acts deserved.

At the inception of this movement Ireland
was under the Penal Laws. Against the Roman Catholic, statutes
unequalled in ferocity were still upon the statute books. Those
laws, although ostensibly designed to convert Catholics to the
Protestant Faith, were in reality chiefly aimed at the conversion of
Catholic-owned property into Protestant- owned property. The son of
a Catholic property-holder could dispossess his own father and take
possession of his property simply by making affidavit that he, the
son, had accepted the Protestant religion. Thenceforth the father
would be by law a pensioner upon the son's bounty. The wife of a
Catholic could deprive her husband of all control over his property
by simply becoming a Protestant. A Catholic could not own a horse
worth more than £5. If he did, any Protestant could take his horse
from him in the light of day and give him £5 in full payment of all
rights in the horse. On the head of a Catholic schoolmaster or a
Catholic priest the same price was put as on the head of a wolf.
Catholics were eligible to no public office, and were debarred from
most of the professions.

In fact the Catholic religion was an
illegal institution. Yet it grew and flourished, and incidentally it
may be observed it secured a hold upon the affections and in the
hearts of the Irish people as rapidly as it lost the same hold in
France and Italy, where the Catholic religion was a dominant state
institution -- a fact worth noting by those Catholics who are
clamouring for the endowment of Catholic institutions out of public
funds.

It must be remembered by the student,
however, that the Penal Laws, although still upon the statue book,
had been largely inoperative before the closing quarter of the
eighteenth century. This was not due to any clemency on the part of
the English Government, but was the result of the dislike of those
laws felt by the majority of intelligent Irish Protestants. The
latter simply refused to take advantage of them even to their
personal aggrandisement, and there are very few cases on actual
record where the property of Catholics was wrested from them by
their Protestant neighbours as a result of the Penal Laws in the
generations following the close of the Williamite war. These laws
were in fact too horrible to be enforced, and in this matter public
opinion was far ahead of legislative enactment. All historians agree
upon this point.

Class lines, on the other hand, were far
more strictly drawn than religious lines, as they always were in
Ireland since the break up of the clan system, and as they are to
this day. We have the words of such an eminent authority as
Archbishop Whatley in this connection, which coming, as they do,
from the pen of a supporter of the British Government and of the
Protestant Establishment, are doubly valuable as witness to the fact
that Irish politics and divisions turn primarily around questions of
property and only nominally around questions of religion. He says:

Many instances have come to my knowledge of
the most furious Orangemen stripping their estates of a Protestant
tenantry who had been there for generations and letting their land
to Roman Catholics "...at an advance of a shilling an
acre."

These Protestants so evicted, be it
remembered, were the men and women whose fathers had saved Ireland
for King William and Protestantism, as against King James and
Catholicity, and the evictions here recorded were the rewards of
their father's victory and their own fidelity. In addition to this
class line on the economic field the political representation of the
country was the exclusive property of the upper class.

A majority of the members of the Irish
Parliament sat as the nominees of certain members of the aristocracy
who owned the estates on which they `represented' were situated.
Such boroughs were called `Pocket Boroughs' from the fact that they
were as much under the control of the landed aristocrat as if he
carried them in his pocket. In addition to this, throughout the
entire island the power of electing members of Parliament was the
exclusive possession of a privileged few. The great mass of the
Catholic and Protestant population were voteless.

This was the situation when the Volunteer
movement arose. There were thus three great political grievances
before the Irish public. The English Parliament had prohibited Irish
trade with Europe and America except through an English port, thus
crippling the development of Irish capitalism; representation in the
House of Commons in Dublin was denied alike to Protestant and
Catholic workers, and to all save a limited few Protestant
capitalists, and the nominees of the aristocracy; and finally all
Catholics were suffering under religious disabilities. As soon as
the Volunteers (all of whom were Protestants) had arms in their
hands they began to agitate for the removal of all these grievances.

On the first all were unanimous, and
accordingly when they paraded the streets of Dublin on the day of
the assembling of Parliament, they hung upon the mouths of their
cannon placards bearing the significant words: FREE TRADE OR ELSE --
and the implied threat from a united people in arms won their case.
Free Trade was granted. And at that moment an Irish Republic could
have been won as surely as Free Trade. But when the rank and file of
the Volunteers proceeded to outline their demands for the removal of
their remaining political grievances -- to demand popular
representation in Parliament -- all their leaders deserted. They had
elected aristocrats, glib-tongued lawyers and professional patriots
to be their officers, and all higher ranks betrayed them in their in
hour of need. After the granting of Free Trade a Volunteer
convention was summoned to meet in Dublin to consider the question
of popular representation in Parliament. Lord Charlemont, the
commander- in-chief of the body, repudiated the convention; his
example was followed by all the lesser fry of the aristocratic
officers, and finally when it did meet, Henry Grattan, whose
political and personal fortunes the Volunteers had made, denounced
them in Parliament as `an armed rabble'.

The convention, after some fruitless
debate, adjourned in confusion, and on a subsequent attempt to
convene another Convention the meeting was prohibited by Government
proclamation and the signers of the call for the assembly were
arrested and heavily fined. The Government, having made peace in
America, with the granting of American independence, had been able
to mass troops in Ireland and prepare to try conclusions with the
Volunteers. Its refusal to consider the demand for popular
representation was its gage of battle, and the proclamation of the
last attempt at a Convention was the sign of its victory. The
Volunteers had, in fact, surrendered without a blow. The
responsibility for this shameful surrender rests entirely upon the
Irish capitalist class. Had they stood by the reformers, the
defection of the aristocracy would have mattered little, indeed it
is certain that the radical element must have foreseen and had been
prepared for that defection. But the act of the merchants in
throwing in their lot with the aristocracy could not have been
foreseen; it was too shameful an act to be anticipated by any but
its perpetrators. It must not be imagined, moreover, that these
reactionary elements made no attempt to hide their treason to the
cause of freedom.

On the contrary, they were most painstaking
in keeping up the appearance of popular sympathies and in
endeavouring to divert public attention along other lines than those
on which the real issues were staked. There is a delicious passage
in the Life of Henry Grattan, edited by his son,
describing the manner in which the Government obtained possession of
the arms of the various corps of Dublin Volunteers, which presents
in itself a picture in microcosm of very many epochs of Irish
history and illustrates the salient characteristics of the classes
and the part they play in Irish public life.

Dublin is Ireland in miniature; nay, Dublin
is Ireland in concentrated essence. All that makes Ireland great or
miserable, magnificent or squalid, ideally revolutionary or
hopelessly reactionary, grandly unselfish or vilely treacherous, is
stronger and more pronounced in Dublin than elsewhere in Ireland.
Thus the part played by Dublin in any National crisis is sure to be
simply a metropolitan setting for the role played by the same
passions throughout the Irish provinces. Hence the value of the
following unconscious contribution to the study of Irish history
from the pen of the son of Henry Grattan.

In Dublin there were three divisions of
Volunteers -- corresponding to the three popular divisions of the
`patriotic' forces. There was the Liberty Corps, recruited
exclusively from the working class; the Merchants Corps, composed of
the capitalist class, and the Lawyers Corps, the members of the
legal fraternity. Henry Grattan, Jr., telling of the action of the
Government after the passage of the Arms and Gunpowder Bill
requiring the Volunteers to give up their arms to the authorities
for safe keeping, says the Government `seized the artillery of the
Liberty Corps, made a private arrangement by which it got possession
of that belonging to the Merchant Corps; they induced the lawyers to
give up theirs, first making a public procession before they were
surrendered'.

In other words and plainer language, the
Government had to use force to seize the arms of the working men,
but the capitalists gave up theirs secretly as the result of a
private bargain, the terms of which we are not made acquainted with;
and the lawyers took theirs through the streets of Dublin in a
public parade to maintain the prestige of the legal fraternity in
the eyes of the credulous Dublin workers, and then, whilst their
throats were still husky from publicly cheering the `guns of the
Volunteers', privately handed those guns over to the enemies of the
people.

The working men fought, the capitalists
sold out, and the lawyers bluffed.

Then, as ever in Ireland, the fate of the
country depended upon the issue of the struggle between the forces
of aristocracy and the forces of democracy. The working class in
town and the peasantry in the country were enthusiastic over the
success of the revolutionary forces in America and France, and were
burning with a desire to emulate their deeds in Ireland. But the
Irish capitalist class dreaded the people more than they feared the
British Government; and in the crisis of their country's fate their
influence and counsels were withdrawn from the popular side. Whilst
this battle was being fought out with such fatal results to the
cause of freedom, there was going on elsewhere in Ireland a more
spectacular battle over a mock issue. And as is the wont of things
in Ireland this sham battle engrosses the greatest amount of
attention in Irish history. We have already alluded to the Henry
Flood who made himself conspicuous in the Irish Parliament by out-Heroding
Herod in his denunciation of the Government for failing to hang
enough peasants to satisfy him. Mr. Henry Grattan we have also
introduced to our readers. These two men were the Parliamentary
leaders of the `patriot party' in the House of Commons -- the `rival
Harries', as the Dublin crowd sarcastically described them. When the
threat of the Volunteers compelled the English authorities to
formally renounce all its rights to make laws binding the Irish
parliament, these two patriots quarrelled, and, we are seriously
informed by the grave historians and learned historians, the subject
of their quarrel divided all Ireland. In telling of what that
subject was we hope our readers will not accuse us of fooling; we
are not, although the temptation is almost irresistible. We are
soberly stating the historical facts. The grave and learned
historians tell us that Grattan and Flood quarrelled because Flood
insisted that England should be required to promise that it would
never again interfere to make laws governing the Irish Parliament,
and Grattan insisted that it would be an insult to the honour of
England to require any such promise.

As we have said, the grave and learned
historians declare that all Ireland took sides in this quarrel, even
such a hater of England as John Mitchell in his History of
Ireland seemingly believes this to be the case. Yet we
absolutely refuse to give any credence to the story. We are firmly
convinced that while Grattan and Flood were splitting the air with
declamations upon this subject, if an enquirer had gone down into
any Irish harvest field and asked the first reaper he met his
opinion of the matter, the said reaper would have touched the heart
of the question without losing a single swing of his hook. He would
have said truly: --

`An' sure, what does it matter what England
promises? Won't she break her promise, anyway as soon as it suits
her, and she is able to?'

It is difficult to believe that either
Grattan or Flood could have seriously thought that any promise would
bind England, a country which even then was notorious all over the
world for broken faith and dishonoured treaties. Today the recital
of facts of this famous controversy looks like a poor attempt at
humour, but in view of the tragic setting of the controversy we must
say that it bears the same relation to humour that a joke would in a
torture chamber. Grattan and Flood in this case were but two skilful
actors indulging in oratorical horse-play at the death-bed of the
murdered hopes of a people. Were any other argument, outside of the
absurdity of the legal hairsplitting on both sides, needed to prove
how little such a sham battle really interested the great mass of
the people the record of the two leaders would suffice. Mr. Flood
was not only known to be an enemy of the oppressed peasantry and a
hater of the Catholics -- that is to say, of the great mass of the
inhabitants of Ireland -- but he had also spoken and voted in the
Irish Parliament in favour of a motion to pay the expenses of an
army of 10,000 British soldiers to be sent to put down the
Revolution in America, and Mr. Grattan on his part had accepted a
donation of £50,000 from the Government for his `patriotic'
services, and afterwards, in excess of gratitude for this timely
aid, repaid the Government by betraying and denouncing the
Volunteers.

On the other great questions of the day
they were each occupying an equivocal position, playing fast and
loose. For instance: --

Mr. Grattan believed in religious freedom
-- amongst property owners, but opposed all extension of the
suffrage to the working class.

Mr.Flood would have given the suffrage to
all Protestants, rich or poor, and denied it to all Catholics, rich
or poor.

Mr. Grattan would have given the vote to
every man who owned property, irrespective of religion, and he
opposed its extension to any propertyless man. In the Irish House of
Commons he bitterly denounced the United Irishmen, of whom we will
treat later, for proposing universal suffrage, which he declared
would ruin the country and destroy all order.

It will be seen that Mr. Grattan was the
ideal capitalist statesman; his spirit was the spirit of the
bourgeoisie incarnate. He cared more for the interests of property
than for human rights or for the supremacy of any religion.

His early bent in that direction is seen in
a letter he sent to his friend, a Mr. Broome, dated November 3,
1767, and reproduced by his son in his edition of the life and
speeches of his father. The letter shows the eminently respectable,
anti-revolutionary, religious Mr. Henry Grattan to have been at
heart, a free thinker, free-lover, and epicurean philosopher, who
had early understood the wisdom of not allowing these opinions to be
known to the common multitude whom he aspired to govern. We extract:
--

You and I, in this as in most other
things, perfectly agree; we think marriage is an artificial, not a
natural, institution, and imagine women too frail a bark for so
long and tempestuous a voyage as that of life...
I have become an epicurean philosopher; consider this world as our
ne plus ultra, and happiness as our great object in it...
Such a subject is too extensive and too dangerous for a letter; in
our privacy we shall dwell upon it more copiously.

This, be it noted, is perhaps not the
Grattan of the poet Moore's rhapsody, but it is the real Grattan.

Small wonder that the Dublin mob stoned
this Grattan on his return from England, on one occasion, after
attending parliament in London. His rhetoric and heroics did not
deceive them, even if they did bewitch the historians. His dramatic
rising from a sick bed to appear before the purchased traitors who
sold their votes to carry the Union, in order to appeal to them not
to fulfil their bargain, makes indeed a fine tableau for romantic
historians to dwell upon, but it was a poor compensation to the
common people for the Volunteers insulted and betrayed, and the
cause of popular suffrage opposed and misrepresented.

A further and, to our mind, conclusive
proof of the manner in which the `Parliament of '82' was regarded by
the real Nationalists and progressive thinkers of Ireland is to be
found in the extract below from the famous pamphlet written by
Theobald Wolfe Tone and published September, 1791, entitled An
Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. It is
interesting to recall that this biting characterisation of the
`glorious revolution of 1782' from the pen of the most far-seeing
Irishman of his day, has been so little to the liking of our
historians and journalists that it was rigidly boycotted by them all
until the present writer reprinted it in 1897, in Dublin, in a
series of '98 Readings containing also many other
forgotten and inconvenient documents of the same period. Since then
it has several times been republished exactly as we rereprinted the
extract, but to judge by the manner in which some of our friends
still declare they `stand upon the constitution of '82' it has been
published in vain for some people.

(Extract from the famous pamphlet, An
Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, published
September, 1791).

I have said that we have no National
Government. Before the year 1782 it was not pretended that we had,
and it is at least a curious, if not a useful, speculation to
examine how we stand in that regard now. And I have little dread
of being confuted, when I assert that all we got by what we are
pleased to dignify with the name of Revolution was simply the
means of doing good according to law, without recurring to the
great rule of nature, which is above all positive Statutes;
whether we have done good or not, why we have omitted to do good
is a serious question. The pride of the nation, the vanity of
individuals concerned, the moderation of some honest men, the
corruption of knaves, I know may be alarmed when I assert that the
revolution of 1782 was the most bungling, imperfect business that
ever threw ridicule on a lofty epithet, by assuming it unworthily.
It is not pleasant to any Irishman to make such a concession, but
it cannot be helped if truth will have it so. It is much better to
delude ourselves or be gulled by our enemies with praises which we
do not deserve, or imaginary blessings which we do not enjoy.

I leave to the admirers of that era to
vent flowing declamations on its theoretical advantages, and its
visionary glories; it is a fine subject, and peculiarly flattering
to my countrymen, many of whom were actors, and almost all
spectators of it. Be mine the unpleasing task to strip it of its
plumage and its tinsel, and show the naked figure. The operation
will be severe, but if properly attended to may give us a strong
and striking lesson of caution and of wisdom.

The Revolution of 1782 was a Revolution
which enabled Irishmen to sell at a much higher price their honour,
their integrity, and the interests of their country; it was a
Revolution which, while at one stroke it doubled the value of
every borough-monger in the kingdom, left three-fourths of our
countrymen slaves as it found them, and the government of Ireland
in the base and wicked and contemptible hands who had spent their
lives in degrading and plundering her; nay, some of whom had given
their last vote decidedly, though hopelessly, against this, our
famous Revolution. Who of the veteran enemies of the country lost
his place or his pension? Who was called forth to station or
office from the ranks of opposition? Not one. The power remained
in the hands of our enemies, again to be exerted for our ruin,
with this difference, that formerly we had our distress, our
injuries, and our insults gratis at the hands of England; but now
we pay very dearly to receive the same with aggravation, through
the hands of Irishmen -- yet this we boast of and call a
Revolution!

And so we close this chapter on the
Volunteers -- a chapter of great opportunities lost, of popular
confidence betrayed. A few extracts from some verses written at the
time in Dublin serve as an epitome of the times, even if they do
seem a little bitter.

Who aroused the people?
The rival Harries rose
And pulled each other's nose.
And said they aroused the people.

What did the Volunteers?
They mustered and paraded
Until their laurels faded.
This did the Volunteers.

How died the Volunteers?
The death that's fit for slaves.
They slunk into their graves.
Thus died the Volunteers.